


Rapport

by Athaia



Category: Man from Atlantis
Genre: Canon Divergent, Community: smallfandomfest, F/M, Gen, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:29:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27998283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Athaia/pseuds/Athaia
Summary: Maybe there was no way for them to communicate.
Relationships: Mark Harris/Elizabeth Merrill
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Small Fandoms Fest





	Rapport

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt was: the aquarium was far too small.

The man she had named ‘Mark Harris’ wouldn’t talk.

Dr. Elizabeth Merrill was certain that he understood English by now, even if he still didn’t react to anything she said to him, but her colleagues didn’t share her conviction. The most benevolent jokes wondered if he had sold his voice to Ursula the sea witch in exchange for legs. The less benevolent jokes suggested they pit him against an octopus to see which of them predicted the winning teams in the playoffs more accurately, and put their bets on the octopus.

Nobody but her regarded Mark as a human... well, he probably wasn’t human; at least not a member of  _ homo sapiens sapiens.  _ In her mind, she had classified him as a separate subspecies:  _ homo sapiens undinus.  _ The man of the waves. Or maybe she should propose something more prosaic:  _ homo sapiens aquaticus.  _ If it ever came to presenting him to someone else but the Navy.

As infuriating as the casual dismissal by her colleagues was, she was more worried about the sentiments of her superiors, who all too readily agreed with her that Mark Harris was sentient, intelligent, and fully capable of understanding their language by now.  _ They  _ didn’t think he was unable to speak; and after their initial good-natured reception of her discoveries about Mark’s abilities — or maybe because of them — their patience was now running out. Admiral Pierce had made it clear during her last briefing that the Navy wasn’t willing to wait much longer for him to start talking. 

“I can’t force him,” Elizabeth had protested. “For all we know, he may be genuinely unable to form sounds the way we do.”

“Then find other ways to get a response from it.” The admiral had stopped referring to Mark by his name, or even a proper pronoun when it became clear that they couldn’t communicate with him. “Have it wave its fins, or push a button with a picture on it. But I need results, and if you fail to achieve them because you don’t want to properly motivate this creature...”

“His name is Mark Harris,” Elizabeth had said, maybe a bit too heatedly. “And he’s not a man-shaped dolphin, so please could you stop referring to him as ‘it’...”

_ “He _ isn’t your pet to coddle or play with, doctor. You said it yourself, man- _ shaped.  _ Whatever he is, he’s not a man. Don’t fool yourself — and don’t let that shape affect your professional distance.”

She had been too stunned to come up with a suitably sharp retort. “Are you questioning my conduct, sir?”

The admiral had given her a pointed look. “Not yet, Dr. Merrill.”

And she was dismissed.

Now, as she was standing in front of the aquarium that had become Mark’s home, the conversation played in her mind over and over again. Admiral Pierce hadn’t mentioned a due date for Mark’s first word, but that fact made her even more nervous. It meant the Navy could pull the plug at any moment, without warning. Some day, she’d walk into the lab, and the aquarium would be empty.

The object of her desolate ruminations was floating near the bottom of the tank, motionless except for tiny movements of his hands and feet to keep him from drifting all the way down to the tiles on the floor. In that moment, he really reminded her of a fish. When she had entered the lab, he had swum to the glass and peered out at her, but when she hadn’t moved, hadn’t talked to him, he had retreated into the center of his habitat, ignoring her. 

Maybe he was bored. The aquarium was empty, a turquoise desert devoid of all live, except for him. 

Or maybe he was distraught — it suddenly occurred to Elizabeth that the aquarium was like solitary confinement, especially since it provided no sensory stimulation at all. 

The realization made her heart speed up.  _ Oh my god, have we been torturing him all this time?  _ His sessions with her, and with the physicians taking him out for tests and measurements, had been the only diversion during his captivity. 

_ If I thought that the aliens who captured me were torturing me, I’d refuse to talk to them, too.  _

Suddenly the floating figure seemed to exude loneliness and despair; the tiny movements of his fingers were listless. There was no reason he should frolic in this sterile basin, Elizabeth thought. It was an abomination. 

And it was far too small, too.

As if he had sensed her agitation, Mark came back to the glass and stared at her face. He seemed to be angry, too — but that was just a misperception; his face was devoid of expression, as always. A perfect screen for her projections. A mirror that never revealed anything of what might be going on behind those catlike eyes.

Maybe he really  _ couldn’t  _ talk.

But the aquarium was still too small. Too empty. Too...

“I’ll be right back,” Elizabeth told the silent face on the other side of the glass. “We’ll do something stupid, you and I.”

They had clothes for him, of course; it wouldn’t do to lead a man — or even a man-shaped alien — stark naked to his physical appointments. But he didn’t seem to like them, as it always took some time to coax him out of the water. Today was no difference: Mark hesitated, his face wary... but no; that was again her doing, projecting her own feelings of unrest onto his blank expression. 

She did manage to persuade him to put on the clothes; not for the first time, she wondered if the coarseness of the fabric was the reason for his slow response. His skin was different from a hum... a  _ land-dwelling _ human, completely hairless and incredibly smooth, so it was probably more sensitive. He hadn’t worn anything when he had been found, and hadn’t seemed to miss it, either; it had taken some work to convince him to wear a swim trunk, at least. Did a fish feel naked in the water?

_ But he isn’t a fish. _

They strolled out of the main gate in broad daylight; the guard knew her and just waved them through. Everyone knew Dr. Merrill, and the few people who didn’t mistake Mark for a visitor probably assumed that she was taking him to a lab for some new experiments. 

Well, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. It was an experiment, of the kind that could destroy her career, and any future prospects she could have with any other institute, short of defecting to the Russians or the Chinese. She hoped the guard wouldn’t also get into trouble for his lassitude later, but she didn’t want to turn around and go back now.

The lab aquarium  _ was _ far to small! How could it be anything else, compared to the vastness of the sea?

Mark had been silent the whole way from the lab to her car. His breathing had become more labored when they had reached the parking lot, and when she fastened his seatbelt, he was tearing at the collar of his shirt. 

“It’s not far away, Mark,” she reassured him. “It won’t take long to get there.” 

She always talked to him as if he could understand her; not in the way people talked to their pets, or their plants. Over time, she had become the only one to continue having these one-sided conversations with him, while everyone else had switched from talking  _ to  _ him to talking  _ about  _ him, even in his presence. If Mark resented being treated like this, he didn’t show it.

He didn’t acknowledge her now either, as usual, but he stopped tugging at his shirt. 

The beach was packed, which suited her this time. They would be a couple among many, a moving needle in a haystack of moving needles... the metaphor seemed off to her somehow, but she was too focused on steering Mark through the crowd to figure out where it had went amiss. Mark would’ve been frozen to the spot if she hadn’t dragged him on; his head was turning constantly, staring at people far too long, trying to take it all in.

After the forced isolation of the aquarium, she was now overloading his senses with an avalanche of information.

_Congratulations, Liz — you’re a picture-book evil scientist. Tomorrow, we’ll fire the shrink ray from our moon base at the nations’ leaders to start_ _our global takeover._

They had finally reached the water, and now Mark’s attention was no longer on the noisy tourists. He stared at the waves, then at her, as if he was asking her if she was serious, or if this was an evil trick she was playing on him.

In a way, Elizabeth realized, it  _ was  _ an evil trick she was playing on him. What could be more cruel than to give him his freedom... and to ask him to give it up again, for her sake?

_ He won’t do it. What reason does he have? What reason have I ever given him? _

But they were already here. She had already made that decision, foolish as it was. “Mark,” she said, trying and failing to suppress the slight tremble in her voice, “Mark, I know this is difficult to understand, but you must come back. This is... this is an afternoon of freedom I stole for you from my superiors. I sneaked you out of the institute — we were actually not allowed to leave, do you understand that?”

He was giving her his undivided attention, but his face betrayed nothing; she couldn’t say if he even understood a word she was saying. For a second, she was unable to go on, to draw a breath. 

His eyes weren’t that of a human. They were alien, and the mind reflected in them was inscrutable, incomprehensible. 

Maybe there was no way for them to communicate. Maybe it had nothing to do with differing speech apparatuses.

“If you don’t come back,” she continued, “I will be in so much trouble. I’ll lose my job, maybe... maybe they’ll put me in jail. Please, Mark, when you’ve swum your fill... please come back. I can’t force you, but I... beg you to do this for me. Will you?”

He stared at her for a long moment; then he turned away and began to take off his clothes. 

He also got rid of the swim trunk. Elizabeth wanted to look away, but didn’t. 

Mark stepped into the surf and was gone. There was no showy dive, no splashing run into the waves, just a quiet slipping away.

He didn’t resurface.

Elizabeth kicked off her slippers, sat down in the sand and drew her knees to her chest, and waited. 

The sand was warm between her toes, and the sun was burning her neck. The surf rushing at the sand and retreating again, the yells of children and cries of seagulls, flowed together and formed a cushion of white noise that silenced her frantic mind. She lost all sense of time. 

Mark wouldn’t come back. Elizabeth turned the thought in her mind like an interesting seashell. He wouldn’t come back, and she would lose her career and her future, but the knowledge failed to stir any kind of emotional reaction in her. She felt empty.

The aquarium would stay empty, too. That was a good thing. 

The sun hung low over the horizon. The sand felt cool under her feet, and her back was aching from sitting in the same pose for hours. It was time to go back and face the music. She reached for her slippers.

When she looked up, Mark was towering over her, dripping wet, skin glowing in the copper light of the setting sun. She hadn’t seen him appear from the sea, hadn’t heard him coming up the beach to her. He had just materialized in front of her, it seemed, looking down at her with the same blank, contemplative expression as always. 

She stared up at him, for once as bereft of words as he was. It wasn’t the realization that he was beautiful, stunning... man, or man-shaped alien, who cared? Not her...

It was the realization that he had come back when nothing had compelled him to do so. He had come back of his own free will, because she had asked him to, because he had understood her.

He had come back for her sake.

Her eyes blurred, and she fought for breath. Through her tears, she saw him slowly lower himself into a crouch and stare at her face even more intently as before. He reached out and touched her wet cheek with one finger. 

Elizabeth sniffed and rubbed her cheek with the heel of her hand, embarrassed. “I was just surprised, that’s all. Just a few silly tears, it’s nothing, I’m fine—“

Mark licked the teardrop off his finger, and the rest of her words dried up in her throat. It was a tiny flick of the tongue, just the tip of his tongue, and the sight of it sent a little electric spark through her insides. Although she was sure that Mark hadn’t been motivated by anything but curiosity, the gesture was deeply, disturbingly intimate. 

And he had still not put any of his clothes on.

For the first time since she had met him, a genuine emotion emerged on Mark’s face. Surprise. Amazement. Wonder. 

His eyes sought hers, and for a moment, Elizabeth regretted that she had wiped away her tears.

In the next moment, she was just as deeply relieved that she had.

“Put on your clothes,” she said. “I can’t take you back to the car like this. We’ll both get jailed.”

They drove back in silence — a mutual silence this time. And though she kept her eyes firmly on the road, she could see from the corner of her eyes that Mark was looking at her the whole time. 

She could’ve sworn that the look of wonder was still on his face.


End file.
